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My senior Economics class left me this message for Valentine’s Day this week! It’s sweet and nice to know your students’ demand for you is completely inelastic and that they view you as such a necessity!

However, I always think about how much of what I’m doing is actually preparing students to be independent self-regulated learners rather than teacher-dependent spoon-fed learners… The IB is all about teaching students to be responsible for their own learning and to take initiative and seek knowledge rather than just passively receive it, to be self-motivated inquirers…

However, as an IB Economics teacher, I can speak for my subject and say that the IB Economics syllabus is HUGE! There are numerous learning outcomes in four different sections of the syllabus. Proper inquiry-based learning requires time and more focus on processes rather than content. However, the syllabus is content-heavy, and as a teacher I feel like I’m always time-poor!

So how does a time-poor teacher with a content-heavy syllabus empower students to be inquirers and take responsibility for their own learning? I’m not really sure, and I’m still figuring it out, but from my experience so far, I’ve devised a few strategies:

1- EcoNews blogging assignments:

Basically, every few weeks, I ask students to go and find a news article that relates to a part of the syllabus we have recently covered.

Students then post the link to the article and a short 250 word analysis/evaluation using the IA criteria as a framework. Basically it’s a mini IA so it trains them for their actual IAs, but also helps them link what we’re talking about in the classroom with the outside world and gives them ‘real-life examples’ to enrich their Paper 1 essay questions too! So many birds with one stone!

2- Student Teaching presentations:

Occasionally I’ll assign groups of students sections of syllabus (I give them actual learning outcomes screenshot directly from syllabus), and ask them to prepare a lesson to teach the class this content. The lesson needs to include the content assigned, 1 or 2 short YouTube videos, 2 or 3 discussion questions, and needs to end with a paper 1 or paper 2 or paper 3 assessment exercise for the class to apply what they’ve learned (there are lots of exam-style questions in IB Economics textbooks).

3- Economics inquiry blogposts:

Sometimes, I take a break from the syllabus completely and I remind the students of what I believe are the six main principles of economics: scarcity, choices, consequences of choices, opportunity cost, incentives, and economic systems…

Students then pick a few of these principles and formulate an ‘economic question’ about something from their daily life that they want to analyze economically… Then they write a blogpost about it: no diagrams, no definitions, no fancy shmancy models, just a short blogpost about an economic question using only simple economic tools!

4- Occasional flipped units:

So I have a Youtube channel of IB Economics videos for the microeconomics and macroeconomics sections of the syllabus. Occasionally I’ll flip a specific topic or section where students are assigned lectures to watch at home (research proves flipped classroom works better when videos are made by their teacher), then come into class and work on practice activities or blog about topic or exam-style questions. This does free up class time, but I would not advocate for a fully flipped classroom ALL THE TIME, because it gets monotonous too 😉

These are my strategies for engaging my IB Economics students in inquiry-based learning and hopefully instilling in them a sense of responsibility for their own learning so that their demand for me is not as ‘inelastic’!

At St Timothy’s, we have a dining program (which serves great food by the way). We also have a pretty cool system for our daily lunches. Each teacher is assigned a table that is theirs, mine is Table 9, and every two weeks a different group of students is assigned to sit on your table, so that by the end of the academic year you’ve had lunch with most of the student body!

I love my table! I use those lunch time student rotations to get to know students I don’t teach or build stronger rapport with students I do teach…

About two weeks ago, a student I teach came up to me during lunch time saying “Mr Elashiry, quick quick tell me something good! I’m having a terrible day!”

I panicked and felt like I was put on the spot and I too was having a somewhat challenging day, but I found myself asking her “have you had bad days before?”, to which she replied “yes”… Then I said “sometimes these bad days turn into bad weeks or bad months even, but eventually you end up having a good day or good week or good month right?” She replied “yes!”

I said “and there’s something good for you! No matter how bad a ‘bad day’ is, eventually it’ll pass and you’ll have a good day!”

It’s been a very long time since I have blogged! I have been focusing on building my library of IB Economics online videos and adjusting to a new school in a new country, as well as adjusting to being a teacher at a boarding school (which is a whole other ball-game).

However, THIS happened yesterday:

I had a swim meet and so had to assign my A-block American History class some work and leave for the swim meet. I come back the next day and I see this note on the board. After of course taking a photo of it and snapping it on both Instagram and Facebook so I can brag and show off, I realized I want to get back into blogging and sharing my journey and thoughts as a teacher, as well as my reflections.

It feels great that my students think of my classes as ‘therapeutic’, as a place where they can be themselves and express their feelings and be heard and understood! I would so much rather be remembered as that kind of teacher as opposed to to the teacher that ‘had so much knowledge’ about what they teach…

Today marks the end of my first ver online IB PD workshop! It was a workshop that consisted of four separate modules, each module running for one week. I thoroughly enjoyed this workshop, particularly how it was structured as well as the learning activities that we were assigned.

The first week focused mostly on introducing the IB DP Economics Course Guide and Syllabus, and getting us as teachers to reflect on the IB Philosphy and the IB Learner Profile.

The second week focused more on the Syllabus content, and making us become more familiar with the four sections of the syllabus through a Jigsaw activity where we were divided into four groups and each group had to summarize the main outcomes of their assigned section for the other groups. There were also lots of other discussions about teaching strategies and tools.

The third week focused on the Assessment: internal as well as external. We had to create a Wiki summarizing the main expectations of external assessment, as well as mark sample papers and compare our marks to the Examiner’s marks. We were also assigned to create an outline for a sample IA commentary and find suitable articles for IAs.

The last week focused mainly on resourcing the IB DP Economics classroom, and explored different resources: textbooks, e-books, Web 2.0 tools, YouTube videos and many more!

I have to admit I enjoy online PD a lot more than face-to-face PD workshops, because I prefer to work at my own pace and I have the self-discipline and self-motivation to stay on top of the workshop assignments and activities. Also, I used this online PD workshop as a chance to look up several other Economics teachers on Twitter and LinkedIn and to connect with them, so I also built a PLN with which I can collaborate in the future!

Well, now I can safely say I’ve used it, and I love it! So, I trialed it with my Grade 7 and Grade 8 end-of-year drama assessments, where they had to create a short script for a ‘fable/fairy-tale mix-up’, rehearse it and perform it in front of the class. I created the rubric on iDoceo, took a screenshot and shared it with the classes at the beginning of the task so that the students had an idea what is expected from them.

The rubric was designed to assess two ‘process criteria’: ‘Groupwork’ and ‘Use of rehearsal time’, and two ‘product criteria’: ‘Script’ and ‘Performance’. The rubric also had two criteria that were assessed for the whole group: ‘Script’ and ‘Use of rehearsal time’, and two individual criteria: ‘Performance’ and ‘Groupwork’.

As the students worked on the task (which took a few lessons), I would assess each criterion at the appropriate time: ‘Script’ was recorded on the rubric in iDoceo as soon as I had read their script, ‘Use of rehearsal time’ and ‘Groupwork’ I had assessed during the rehearsal period based on my observations of how the group members interact and rehearse’, and finally ‘Performance’ I would assess as the students performed their scenes.

Then I would hold a conference with each student where I would AirDrop them a screenshot of their assessed rubric, which they would then insert into their Portfolio in Book Creator. We would then record a short voice note where we discuss how they felt about the task and I give them one positive comment and one useful suggestion for improvement in future performances.

Apps/features used in this assessment workflow: iDoceo + AirDrop + Book Creator…

OH MY GOD! Just when you think iDoceo can’t get any better, it does! I know I talk a lot about iDoceo and how much I love it, you can read this post here as evidence, or refer to this page here.

So, iDoceo is basically what I would describe as a ‘Swiss army-knife’ of tools for a typical teacher: lesson planner, calendar, to-do-list, gradebook, timer, seating-planner, random student-selector, resource-library, voice-note recorder, photo/video-evidence-capturer and so much more!

But when I updated my iDoceo on my iPad yesterday, I discovered something wonderful! The new update includes a RUBRIC tool, which integrates seamlessly with the Gradebook… As a teacher using iDoceo, now you can create/import rubrics and grade/assess projects using those rubrics right there on the app… The results will then be added and recorded as a column in the Gradebook!

Here’s a short video of me talking about this new tool, as well as showing how I too am still learning to use it:

Basically, Explain Everything is an iPad app that turns your iPad into an interactive whiteboard where you can draw, doodle, add text, add images, add shapes, record your voice, and export the whole project as a PDF or as a video file to upload elsewhere! It’s amazing…

I’m currently working on building a library of instructional videos for my IB Economics classes next year. It’s a big project, but I’m enjoying every step. These videos are following the IB Syllabus in terms of learning outcomes as well as order of delivery, so I will integrate them with my iTunes U course for IB Economics next year.

Here are the links to playlists of videos I created for teaching the different concepts under the topic of ‘Demand & Supply‘ and the topic of ‘Elasticity‘.

Some tips for using Explain Everything to create instructional videos:

1- Make it visual and try to use text sparingly => your voice should do most of the ‘explaining’.

2- Make it short and sweet => 5-12 minutes is reasonable.

3- Use colors and shapes.

4- Record using a microphone in a quiet area => I just use my iPhone headphones which include a good mic.

5- Start the video by mentioning what the video is about and its learning outcomes.

6- Label each video succinctly and carefully so it’s easy to identify its focus.

7- Be real in the video => don’t be afraid to use humor and show your real personality.

If you have not yet used Explain Everything, I suggest you go give it a try! Enjoy 🙂